Jonathan Wright - The Ambassadors - From Ancient Greece to the Nation State

Poisoners were also apt to give themselves away, and the king’s attendants should always be suspicious of ‘hesitation in speaking, heavy perspiration, yawning, too much bodily tremor, frequent tumbling, evasion of speech [and] carelessness in work’. Whenever the king was presented with ‘water, scents, fragrant powders, dress and garlands’, servants ‘shall first touch these things by their eyes, arms and breast’.

It was a fitting response to a cynical political milieu. The Mauryans knew of every potential danger because of an unflinching willingness to employ dubious strategies of their own. Just as ambassadors were expected to spy and to agitate, so agents were sometimes sent to kill off troublesome rivals. Pacts and pledges could be negotiated, but it was also entirely legitimate to break them. A trusted policy in the ancient world was for powers to exchange hostages – often including a ruler’s relatives – when they made treaties; this provided some guarantee that the parties would abide by the terms of an agreement. Kautilya recognized the usefulness of such arrangements, but saw not the slightest reason to honour them. If a prince had been offered up as a hostage, that prince should do everything in his power to engineer his escape.

Carpenters, artisans, and other spies, attending upon the prince (kept as a hostage) may take him away at night through an underground tunnel dug for the purpose. Dancers, actors, singers, players on musical instruments, buffoons, court-bards [and] swimmers previously set about the enemy [as spies], may continue under his service and may indirectly serve the prince. They should have the privilege of entering and going out of the palace at any time. The prince may therefore get out at night disguised as any one of the above spies…Or the prince may be removed concealed under clothes, commodities, vessels, beds, seats and other articles by cooks, confectioners, servants employed to serve the king while bathing, servants employed for carrying conveyances, for spreading the bed, toilet-making, dressing, and procuring water.

It might be necessary to serve sentinels with poisoned food, or to bribe them, or to create a diversion by setting ‘fire to a building filled with valuable articles’. The prince would disguise himself as a shaven-headed ascetic, a diseased man or even a corpse. The strategies enumerated by Kautilya were seemingly endless. 8

Chandragupta and Asoka, grandfather and grandson, inhabited opposite ends of the same philosophical spectrum. Together, they offer a telling lesson in just how drastically, and rapidly, worldviews might change. Diplomacy was always the bellwether of a society’s attitude towards the rest of humanity. Asoka’s optimism and generosity, his policy of conquest through righteousness, were exceptional; in the words of H. G. Wells, among the monarchs that crowd the columns of history, Asoka shines almost alone. The encounters between cultures would more often be clouded by fear and suspicion.

Greeks were tolerated in the ancient city of Alexandria but, as Herodotus explained, ‘no Egyptian man or woman will kiss a Greek or use a Greek knife, spit or cauldron, or even eat the flesh of a bull known to be clean if it has been cut with a Greek knife.’ 9 Muscovite princes would accept the need for relationships with other nations but, well into the seventeenth century, they often refused to shake the hand of a foreigner for fear of infection. During the sixteenth century, Venetians would sell their wares in Ottoman Istanbul, and the Portuguese would trade in Macao, but the communities they traded with would be mistrusted and ghettoized.

Indeed, mention of the Portuguese in Macao brings us to China, the final destination in this survey of the ancient world, and a culture that has agonized more than any other over its dealings with the outside world. One of the duties of history is to puncture lazy orthodoxies, and the travels of one early ambassador do much to confound the notion of unwavering Chinese insularity and xenophobia. Before recounting his tale, however, it would be useful to ponder why that notion is so stubbornly embedded in the Western psyche. To that end, before we visit the Han dynasty of ancient China, a brief detour of twenty-one centuries is called for.

From now on, when barbarians come to the capital to present tribute, the military population and common people who dare to congregate in the streets to stare and make fun of them, or throw broken tiles and thus injure any of the barbarians, shall be punished with the cangue as a warning to the public.

Hui-t’ung-kuan Regulations, 1500 1

For fifty-five days in the summer of 1900 the foreign legations of Peking, crammed into the southern quarter of the city, lay under siege. Resentment of the Western powers had been simmering in China for decades. They had brought newfangled railways that tarnished the harmony of the natural landscape; they had encouraged hordes of zealous Christian missionaries to chip away at the empire’s ancient belief systems; and they had demonstrated an unwavering ambition to dominate China’s political and economic life.

China had been slow to recognize the extraordinary technological advancements of eighteenth-century Europe. The Chinese simply did not realize how mighty and wealthy the West had suddenly become until they tried to snuff out the illegal opium trade in the late 1830s. China was crushed by British force of arms. In the wake of the First Opium War (1839–42), Britain opened up seaports to foreign trade that were entirely removed from Chinese jurisdiction and also annexed Hong Kong. Further crises and humiliations followed. The Russians encroached upon the empire’s northern territories, internal rebellions scarred the middle years of the century, and in 1860 the French and British even temporarily occupied Peking. But in spite of all their successes, the Western powers were still impatient to carve out spheres of even greater influence and profit within the Celestial Empire.

In 1897 the murder of two Protestant missionaries gave Germany the ideal justification for seizing the bustling port of Jiaozhou. For several years, this same Shandong province had also seen a blossoming of enthusiasm for the so-called Boxer movement. Secretive, illegal martial-arts societies, the Boxers had abandoned their traditional anti-dynastic sentiment in favour of virulent anti-Western rhetoric. With their magical rituals and incantations, and their belief that they were immune from bullets, the Boxers offered an irresistible outlet for decades’ worth of resentment. Their influence spread out across northern China during the late 1890s.

The population was in dire need of a rallying cry. A recent war with Japan had ended in humiliating defeat, the Yellow River had burst its banks in 1898, and two years later the northern reaches of the empire had been ravaged by drought. In Peking, power resided with a reactionary empress dowager, whose counsellors urged her to stop demonizing the Boxers as lawless bandits and instead use them to reassert China’s independence. Early in 1900 they were summoned to the capital.

The diplomatic community in Peking was understandably nervous. Ominous news began to rush in from all sides. The British summer legation outside the city was burned down, the Boxers severed the railway lines between Peking and the coast, and on 11 June the chancellor of the Japanese embassy was set upon by an angry crowd, dragged from his coach and hacked to pieces. His battered corpse was thrown in the gutter and his heart presented to a popular general. By the 13th of the month, Boxers were flooding into the city, attacking churches and the homes of foreigners, and digging up Christian graves. When the German ambassador Clemens von Ketteler set out for urgent talks with the government on 20 June he too was murdered in the street. An officially sanctioned siege of the legation quarter by imperial troops now seemed inevitable.